Good Morning,
Culture needs a room, but who controls the room? San Francisco Opera’s musicians struck opening night at 7:25 p.m., with patrons already in their seats for an 8 o’clock curtain (The New York Times). Now that’s a power statement. Across the country, Lonnie Bunch concluded the White House intended to take the Smithsonian in a direction he couldn’t go and resigned, calculating that giving up the office was the price of keeping the institution (The New York Times). And the Kennedy Center revealed it might go bankrupt and shut as early as today. Different fights, same question: whose building is it?
Some answers arrive with a checkbook. George Lucas’s Museum of Narrative Art opens this month in Los Angeles, a “half spaceship, half cetacean” bid to build a canon around the stories he cares about (The Atlantic). The Martha Graham Company, the oldest dance troupe in the country, finally gets a permanent home in New York (The New York Times). And the Trump Arch joins a lengthening list of what one critic reads as architectural crimes against Washington (The Guardian). The power to build is not the same as the judgment to.
Two smaller stories about controlling the medium itself: Christopher Nolan shot “The Odyssey” on film stock that only Kodak still manufactures (The New York Times), and Toronto clubs are banning cameras and smart glasses so a night out can go undocumented again (CBC).
All of our stories below.
